In the US, it was white people who chose to divide society along racial lines; it was white people who chose to establish "white" as the top tier of that racial hierarchy; and it was white people who chose to establish "whiteness" and "white culture" as the signifiers of social status.
And even if I agreed with all of that, it was all established hundreds of years before I was born.
I didn't develop this system;
I never oppressed any non-white persons that I know of;
I never ran any plantations or owned any slaves or forced anybody to live in a ghetto.
I live in financial conditions far worse than many, many,
many non-white people I know. So what would you like me to do to stop this white oppression? Build a time machine and go back 500 years to nip the whole thing in the bud before it even gets started?
If whites in the US didn't want people attacking "whiteness", then maybe whites in the US shouldn't have established "whiteness" as a mechanism of social dominance and oppression.
Once again: all of that jazz was set up before I even existed. My ancestors didn't even enter this country until 1866, after the Civil War was with.
I don't use "whiteness as a mechanism of social dominance and oppression", so I fail to see why I should be hammered over the head for it. I was raised to always treat everyone equal, and any judgements I made were based on an individual's character, not their coloring. Sound familiar? It should---those are almost the exact words that Martin Luther King, Jr. used when speaking about how people should be categorized.
What about the millions of whites, in America, Britain & Europe, who directly fought to free slaves in the Civil War, or who bore poverty & privation to protest & prevent Britain & France from siding with the South and invading the North from French-controlled Mexico and British-controlled Canada?
I think that a lot of people fail to understand that the first slaves that were transported to America were not Africans, but European whites. The indentured servitude system in place between approximately 1520 and 1776 brought thousands of poor Irish, Scottish, English, French, and Dutch persons to North America, to the point that the white chattel slaves outnumbered the free white people by nearly three to one. It wasn't until the middle of the 17th century that slaves became predominantly black Africans, and even then only because English ships captured boatloads of slaves from the Spanish, Dutch, and Portuguese. Many of these white slaves were kidnapped, or sold into servitude as a result of being on the losing side in a war----Oliver Cromwell (good Christian gentleman that he was) sold into slavery thousands of prisoners of war captured during the battles of Preston and Worcester in 1648 and 1651; and King James II (he of the so-called "King James Bible"---undoubtedly another fine, upstanding Christian gentleman) did the same thing with prisoners after the Monmouth Rebellion in 1685.
And while we're talking of defeated prisoners from a war, let us not forget that the primary slavers in Africa were......Africans. Bantu chiefs sold hundreds of thousands of their fellows into slavery to the Europeans operating off the west coast of Africa. Why would they do that?, you may ask. Simple. It's because the Europeans were paying better prices for them than the Arabs operating off the
east coast of Africa.
When all is said and done, did white people treat non-white people abominably in the past? I don't think there's any question of that. Of course they did. Should
I be held to account for what John Hawkins did in 1519? Apparently some people think so, but I refuse to play along with something that I had nothing to do with.
